Sundance TV
American digital cable and satellite television network
Sundance TV (formerly known as Sundance Channel) is an American pay television channel owned by AMC Global Media that launched on February 1, 1996. The channel is named after Robert Redford's character in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and, while it is an extension of Redford's non-profit Sundance Institute, the channel operates independently of both the Institute and the Sundance Film Festival.
Originally, Sundance was dedicated largely to airing documentaries, independent feature films, short films, world cinema, and coverage on the latest developments from each year's Sundance Film Festival. The channel has since incorporated both original and acquired programming and became fully ad-supported in 2013, with programming being edited for content soon thereafter.
As of November 2023, Sundance is available to approximately 54,000,000 pay television households in the United States-down from its 2017 peak of 71,000,000 households.
History
As Sundance Channel (1996–2014)
After negotiations to turn Robert Redford into a partner in AMC Networks predecessor Rainbow Media's Independent Film Channel broke down during 1994, Redford launched Sundance Channel in February 1996 as a joint venture between Showtime Networks (then a division of Viacom, later owned by CBS Corporation and subsequently by ViacomCBS), PolyGram (now NBCUniversal), and Redford (who also served as the creative director of the network).
The channel was initially launched on five cable systems in New York City; Los Angeles; Alexandria, Virginia; Chamblee, Georgia; and Pensacola, Florida. It originally operated mainly as a premium channel, commonly packaged with Showtime and its sister networks The Movie Channel and Flix.
On May 7, 2008, the Rainbow Media subsidiary of Cablevision, owners of rival network IFC, announced that it had purchased Sundance Channel for $496 million. The acquisition of Sundance Channel by Rainbow Media was completed in June 2008.
The public source identifies “Sundance TV” as american digital cable and satellite television network. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Sundance, American and digital.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3503825. VIAF identifies the subject as 151602389. The Library of Congress control number is no2002000463. 2 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1996, 2013, 2023 and 2017.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sundance TV” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.